The Weekly WTF: Cartel drone incursions, Bunny wars, panicans

Plus, America's Olympians compete against their own president

Key takeaways:😉

• There’s so much crazy news that Weekly WTF is now a standalone feature.

• Somebody in Texas is seriously incompetent.

• The most entertaining part of the Super Bowl was the extended cultural warfare over Bad Bunny.

• Olympians have turned on Trump just like other young Americans.

• The Epstein scandal is finally over. 😄

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

El Whoopso. On February 10, the Federal Aviation Administration imposed a 10-day closure on the El Paso, Texas airport … for seven hours. The FAA said with no warning late on February 10 that it was closing airspace around El Paso for 10 days. But the next morning it said, never mind, the airport is open again. Officials in El Paso don’t know what’s going on, and the Trump administration can’t get its story straight.

🛫 Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said there was a “cartel drone incursion.” Really? So the feds penciled in what, a 10-day viewing party?

🛫Unnamed sources told several news organizations the military was testing lasers and other anti-drone technology at nearby Ft. Bliss.

🛫 But doesn’t the military know how to conduct tests without shutting down airports?

🛫 There were also reports that the US military mistook a rogue party balloon for a hostile drone and neutralized the target. Okay? So? Were there another 10 days worth of balloons inbound?

“Cartel drone incursion”

Obviously somebody screwed up in pretty spectacular fashion. President Trump never admits mistakes or apologizes, and his minions mimic the boss. So this could remain a comedy of errors with all the involved parties blaming each other. It’s Congress’s job to conduct oversight and get to the bottom of messes like this. But Congress has become a laughingstock itself. This is government by farce.

Killer Bunny. Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show was far more entertaining than the football game—and it went deep into overtime, with white nationalists battling multiculturalists over the Spanish-language intermission far longer than the Seahawks and Patriots went at it.

President Trump, surprising nobody, trashed the Puerto Rican star’s halftime performance, calling it “absolutely terrible” and adding, “nobody understands what this guy is saying, and the dancing is disgusting.” Trump supporters piled on, Bunny fans fired back, and we all enjoyed a few days of post-game cultural warfare.

Trump, you’ll recall, is an expert dancer who always keeps it clean on stage, so he’s speaking from a position of authority. I mean, look at these two, and tell me Bad Bunny couldn’t use a bit of stage guidance from Grandpa Trump:

I watched the Bad Bunny halftime show with some fellow Anglos. None of us knew what was going on. But it looked like fun. I appreciated some of the decoders published after the game, such as this one by Rolling Stone, that explained the significance of the sugar cane, the electrical poles, the coco frío stand, the dominoes, and the wedding (which was real!) Bad Bunny seems like a charismatic performer passionate about his homeland. Hard not to like him.

[How to survive America in 2026]

The NFL is extremely shrewd, and Commish Roger Goodell and his board of team owners had to know they’d be tweaking Trump by booking a Spanish-speaking Latino, even if he’s the world’s most popular singer. Trump is on a crusade to toss mostly brown migrants out of the United States and whiten and homogenize the whole country. Bad Bunny’s pan-American message of inclusivity and tolerance is the exact opposite of Trump’s.

So why did the NFL risk Trump’s wrath? Two reasons. One is the league is intent on expanding outside the United States, with Mexico, Brazil and other parts of Latin America prime targets. Bad Bunny was a pitch to the NFL’s future audience, not its current one.

The other reason is the NFL thinks it is bigger than Trump. It survived his attacks in 2017, when Trump went on a rampage against black players kneeling during the national anthem. It’s one of the few cultural bastions able to transcend polarization and thrive no matter who tries to politicize it. The NFL probably is bigger than Trump.

[See who’s up and who’s down in the K-shaped economy]

U-S-BOO! American athletes at the Winter Olympics in Italy are competing with their peers from all over the world, and also with their own president. Freestyle skier Gus Kenworthy peed “fuck ice” into the snow and posted a picture on his Instagram account, which got 95,000 likes. The artwork is quite impressive and one has to wonder if he pulled this off on the first try. (We know he was talking about Immigration and Customs Enforcement, not the conditions in Milan, because he said so in his post).

Nice artwork! From Gus Kenworthy Instagram account.

Freestyle skier Hunter Hess said, “just because I’m wearing the flag doesn’t mean I represent everything that’s going on in the U.S.” That’s pretty mild, but Trump must have been having a snowflake moment because he called Hesse a “real loser” and said it’s “too bad” Hess made the Olympic team. Other athletes stood up for Hess.

Maybe Trump will take control of the US Olympic team, like he took control of the Kennedy Center, and only allow Trumpers to try out. That would solve this ridiculous problem of young athletes having their own opinions.

No panicans. The Trump White House published an urgent message urging supporters, “don’t be a panican.” That’s a Trump word for people who worry too much that his policies and actions will cause problems. Why would anybody think that? Americans are totally down with Trump’s racist memes, his federal agents killing nonviolent civilians in Minneapolis and tariffs that are raising everybody’s costs.

At any rate, Trump’s panican message reminds us that the stock market has “exploded,” the border is now sealed, and Trump is “ending the barbaric mutilation of kids.” If you stop to think about it, Trump really is not getting enough credit for ending barbaric mutilations.

The Epstein Six. The last big batch of Epstein files released by the Justice Dept. does contain some enticing new information. Two members of Congress say six men mentioned in the documents are “likely incriminated.” They are: Leslie Wexner, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, Salvatore Nuara, Zurab Mikeladze, Leonic Leonov, and Nicola Caputo.

[The sell-America trade is looking pretty good.]

Les Wexner, now 88, is the billionaire retail magnate who was one of Jeffrey Epstein’s original patrons, hiring him as a financial manager all the way back in the late 1980s. Sulayem is a rich businessman based in Dubai. The other four are more obscure.

The two members of Congress, Democrat Ro Khanna of California and Republican Thomas Massie of Kentucky, didn’t say what “incriminated” means. Khanna did suggest more such names would be forthcoming. He and Massie looked at unredacted Justice Dept. files for only a couple of hours, leaving millions of documents unexamined. “If we found six men that they were hiding in two hours, imagine how many men they are covering up for in those three million files,” Khanna said on February 10.

Oh, also, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says he cut Epstein off in 2005, but it turns out he paid a visit to Epstein’s fantasy island in the Caribbean in 2021. Time flies, must have got his dates mixed up.

At the White House, when reporters asked spokesmodel Karoline Leavitt about the latest Epstein news, she said, “we’re moving on from that.”

Glad it’s finally over!